The Future This Week: May 22, 2017

“Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.”–Carrie Snow

Or, as the saying goes, technology is great when it works. Will artificial intelligence make it work smarter? Faster? More reliably? Or might it just give us more headaches? We’ll find out soon enough, as we careen towards an AI-dominated future.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered a mostly A.I. oriented keynote address at the company’s annual I/O event. This included the revelation that it has developed an AI that is better at creating new AI systems than Google’s own software engineers. Forbes article on the talk here. Futurism.com article, including embedded YouTube video of the entire 2 hours speech, here.

Digital Images–A joint team of Chinese and Australian researchers has developed what is being called the world’s thinnest hologram. It holds out the possibility of 3D images on tablet and smartphone screens.

Socioeconomic—Fast Company reports that it’s not just millennials struggling with college debt. Increasingly, their baby boomer parents and grandparents are also saddled with crushing payments in support of their progeny. The long-term effect on the economy is unclear; but it can’t be good for consumer spending or the real estate market.